Monday, February 07, 2011

Fibonacci Quarterly Goes Electronic

When I was a teenager, this was one of my favorite journals - because, unlike most math journals, I could actually understand most of the articles in it. My parents thought it was weird, but they were very understanding, and even got me a subscription.

I remember one of the articles that blew my mind was Aho and Sloane's Some Doubly Exponential Sequences. The authors found beautiful analyses of some nonlinear recurrences, including one of my favorites:

y1 = 5; yn+1 = (yn - 2)2.

The first few values are y2 = 9; y3 = 49; y4 = 2209; and it is not hard to prove that yn = L2n + 2, where Li is the i'th Lucas number.

It's still a good and worthwhile journal, even if it doesn't usually get much praise from the kind of people who publish in Inventiones. It struggles from time to time with quality issues, and I really dislike the typesetting, but there's often something interesting in it.

So, congrats to the Fibonacci Quarterly for taking this step. If only they'd put in a search function for titles and authors...